Jury Convicts Man in Scheme To Set a Bomb In the Subway

By JOSEPH P. FRIED

Published: July 24, 1998

A Palestinian immigrant who testified that he had wanted to kill as many Jews as possible in a suicide attack was convicted yesterday of plotting to explode a powerful pipe bomb in the New York City subway.

But in a case that raised the specter of another terrorist attack in a city where the World Trade Center was bombed five years ago, the jury in Federal District Court in Brooklyn acquitted a second defendant of charges that he had been part of the conspiracy, instead finding him guilty only of an immigration-related fraud charge.

The bombing plot, which was aborted in a police raid last July with possibly only hours to spare, involved a nail-studded explosive that the authorities said would have burst into hundreds or thousands of streaking metal shards that could have killed scores of people had it detonated as planned.

After the jury pronounced Ghazi Ibrahim Abu Maizar guilty of conspiring to use a weapon of mass destruction, he exclaimed at the defense table: ''Palestinian children do not deserve to die! Nobody in the world deserves to die!''

Then, jumping up from his seat, Mr. Abu Maizar, 24, who was born in Hebron, on the West Bank, when the city was still under Israeli occupation, shouted ''Allah akhbar!'' -- ''God is great'' in Arabic -- and held a copy of the Koran over his head before Federal marshals forced him back into his seat.

Mr. Abu Maizar, a slightly built, bearded man -- wearing a Muslim skullcap he had worn only irregularly during the three-week trial -- then pointed upward with the index fingers of both hands and appeared to be murmuring prayers from the Koran. During the trial, he accused Israel of oppressing Palestinians and also denounced the United States' support for Israel.

His co-defendant, Lafi Khalil, 23, also born in the West Bank, simply buried his face in his hands as he heard the jury acquitting him of charges related to the bomb plot, though convicting him of possessing a bogus alien registration document.

Mr. Abu Maizar now faces a sentence of life in prison. The immigration charge Mr. Khalil was convicted of is normally punishable by up to 10 years in prison, but prosecution and defense lawyers said it could bring a sentence of up to 25 years in this case if the judge finds that Mr. Khalil used it to further a terrorist plot, a judicial finding that is possible despite the jury's acquittal of Mr. Khalil on charges in the bomb plot.

Investigators in the United States have said they had found no evidence linking the defendants to any known terrorist group. And the Israeli Government has said that the men -- who came to the United States separately and met several months before they were arrested -- were not known to have ties to militant groups, although Mr. Abu Maizar was arrested as a teen-ager in 1990 for throwing stones at Israeli soldiers during Palestinian protests.

Judge Reena Raggi set sentencing for Oct. 23.

After the verdict, following nearly 10 hours of jury deliberations over two days, Mr. Khalil's lawyer, Bruce McIntyre, praised the jury's acquittal of his client on the bombing conspiracy charges as ''an absolutely wonderful job.''

''All along we've maintained that he didn't know about what was going on,'' Mr. McIntyre said. He had argued to the jury that despite being arrested with Mr. Abu Maizar in the apartment where the bomb was found -- and despite a snapshot showing Mr. Khalil with pipe parts and wire like those later found in the device -- his client had not been involved in the plot. Among other things, the lawyer argued, his client's fingerprints had not been found on any of the evidence in the case.

Mr. Khalil's father, Taysir Khalil, who had come from his home in Amman, Jordan, for his son's trial, said through an interpreter outside the downtown Brooklyn courthouse, ''I know my son is not guilty, and is innocent, from the first day, and I know there is a fair law in the United States of America.''

A lawyer for Mr. Abu Maizar, Michael P. Padden, said that ''given what transpired in the courtroom, we can't say we're shocked'' by the verdict against his client.

He was referring to Mr. Abu Maizar's testimony -- against the advice of his lawyers -- that he had planned to set off the bomb in a suicide attack in which he hoped to kill as many Jews as possible, though he insisted that the bombing was not to have taken place in the subway.

Earlier in the trial, Mr. Padden and his co-counsel, Jan A. Rostal, maintained that Mr. Abu Maizar had not intended to explode the device, but rather had built it for use as a prop in a fuzzy plot to defraud a Government antiterrorism program of reward money.

They hewed to this line even after Mr. Abu Maizar's admission on the witness stand, with Mr. Padden arguing at the trial's end that the admission was not reliable because it had resulted from his client's ''adoption of a notion'' after his arrest in the case that he was ''a hero of the Palestinian cause.'' For his part, Mr. Abu Maizar testified that he had ''always dreamed to be a martyr.''

An F.B.I. agent testified that after Mr. Abu Maizar was arrested in the police raid on his Park Slope, Brooklyn, apartment, in which he and Mr. Khalil were shot and wounded, Mr. Abu Maizar told him at Kings County Hospital Center that he had wanted to bomb a rush-hour train on the B line ''because there are a lot of Jews that ride that train.'' The line passes through Borough Park section in Brooklyn, which has one of the city's most concentrated populations of Orthodox Jews.

Mr. Padden said his client's conviction -- on charges of possessing and threatening to use the bomb as well as conspiring to use it -- would be appealed on the ground that Judge Raggi should have suppressed certain evidence, including Mr. Abu Maizar's statement at the hospital. The defense had argued that the statement was unreliable because Mr. Abu Maizar had been in a ''hallucinatory'' state when it was said to have been made, while heavily medicated after surgery.

With the prosecutors, Bernadette Miragliotta and John F. Curran at his side, Zachary W. Carter, the United States Attorney in Brooklyn, said that while he was disappointed by Mr. Khalil's acquittal on the charges related to the bomb plot, he was pleased with Mr. Abu Maizar's conviction because it ''sends a strong message that acts of international terrorism or attempts to commit acts of international terrorism on our soil will not be tolerated.''

Those who had known the pair in Park Slope said they hardly seemed like ardently motivated terrorists. Local shopkeepers described them as seeming drifters, living hand-to-mouth on short-term jobs, complaining about how poor they were and often hanging around local stores and ogling passing women.

But heavily armed police officers raided Mr. Abu Maizar's apartment shortly before dawn last July 31 after one of his roommates, a recent immigrant from Egypt named Abdel Rahman Mosabbah, flagged down police officers in the street and told them Mr. Abu Maizar was planning to explode a bomb, possibly in just hours, in the subway or on a bus.

The police said that in addition to finding a pipe bomb ''fully rigged and ready to be detonated,'' they also found in the apartment a note that threatened attacks against American and Jewish interests if various demands were not met, including the release of imprisoned Islamic militants like Ramzi Ahmed Yousef, convicted of masterminding the World Trade Center bombing.

Photos: Ghazi Ibrahim Abu Maizar, right, was convicted of conspiring to use a weapon of mass destruction. His co-defendant, Lafi Khalil, left, was acquitted on that charge but convicted on an immigration charge. Taysir Khalil, who came from Jordan to attend the trial of his son Lafi, said after the verdicts, ''I know my son is not guilty.'' (Chester Higgins Jr./The New York Times)(pg. B6)